Why 'Throwing Candidates Off' with Curveball Questions Is a Bad Idea

“I like to start with an unusual, thought-provoking question — something that shakes it up and throws the candidate off a bit. I want to see how they react.”

This comment, from an investor I recently trained, sums up a common but fundamentally flawed approach to interviewing.

And guess what this investor’s top complaint was, the thing that brought him to us? “Candidates who talk a good game and then underdeliver on the job.”

His interviewing approach was precisely optimized for hiring the kind of candidate he wants to avoid.

Ask yourself: Do you spend your precious time with a candidate doing any of the following?

• Asking a curveball question to see how the candidate handles ambiguity
• Stressing the candidate out to see how they act under pressure
• Probing a random detail in a story to keep a candidate honest or catch them in a lie
• Asking the candidate to “sell” you on anything (like why they want the job)
  

These approaches are a bad idea. It treats an interview like a performance. It rewards people who are “good at interviewing” and tells you very little about their ability to actually do the job in question.

In fact, we have found that you can get remarkably good responses from:

1. Desperate job seekers (they’ve had a lot of recent interviewing practice) 
2. Weaker performers (they’ve learned to talk a good game) 
3. Liars (they’re good at presenting a false picture of themselves)
   

But that’s not the worst part. 

The real problem with this approach to interviewing is the massive opportunity cost. You only have so much time with a candidate. Don’t use it to play games. Use it to gather facts about what this person has actually done in their career. This information, backed with thoughtful references, has real predictive power.

One final caveat: “Throwing candidates off” is not the same thing as presenting the candidate with a novel business or technical problem to solve. Problem-solving interviews (for example, coding exercises or business cases) are a valid approach. But it needs to be straightforward — it’s not a curveball.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

Jordan Burton has 17 years of experience as an executive assessor and interviewing trainer, working with top VC/PE investors and high-growth startups to help them hire the best of the best. He has trained thousands of founders, leaders, and investors on hiring and interviewing skills. He leads Talgo’s business development initiatives, managing relationships with Sequoia Capital, TH Lee, Palantir, Scale AI, and over 50 venture-backed startups.